Microsoft joins Cloud Foundry Foundation

From when we first launched Azure Virtual Machines, I have had the pleasure of working with fantastic community partners and customers. We have built new open-source technologies and have made numerous community contributions. Making Azure an open, flexible, and portable platform takes a lot of friends.

However, we aren’t done. Far, far from it. Today, at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, I am honored to join Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation on stage to announce that we have joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold Member. Cloud Foundry on Azure has seen a lot of customer success, enabling cloud migration with application modernization while still offering an open, portable and hybrid platform. The partnership with the Cloud Foundry Foundation extends our commitment to deeply collaborate and innovate in the open community. We remain committed to create a diverse and open technology ecosystem, to offer you the freedom to deploy the application solution you want on the cloud platform you prefer.

In addition to joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we are also extending Cloud Foundry integration with Azure. This includes back-end integration with Azure Database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) and cloud broker support for SQL Database, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB. We even included the Cloud Foundry CLI in the tools available in the Cloud Shell for easy CF management in seconds. Here are some additional details on the integration offered between Azure and Cloud Foundry.

Enabling the most comprehensive Cloud Foundry support

It has been really exciting working with the community to bring together two thriving ecosystems, offering support for Azure tools and frameworks with Cloud Foundry. In fact, as we develop new services and capabilities in Azure, we offer Cloud Foundry integration from the first day of preview. Here are two examples of exciting integration with announcements from our Microsoft Build developers conference last month:

Cloud Foundry CLI in Azure Cloud Shell - The Azure Cloud Shell embedded in the Azure portal puts a fully featured Bash shell at your fingertips on any device with a browser. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added the Cloud Foundry CLI to the list of tools installed in the Cloud Shell by default.

Support for Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL services - With the new Azure Database offerings, you can now back your CF environment with a store that is fully managed, with automatic scaling and backup built in.

Here are a few other investments we have made to bring together the Azure platform with the Cloud Foundry platform:

Azure Cloud Provider Interface - The Azure CPI provides integration between BOSH and the Azure infrastructure, including the VMs, virtual networks, and other infrastructural elements required to run Cloud Foundry. The CPI is continually updated to take advantage of the latest Azure features, including supporting Azure Stack.

Azure Meta Service Broker - The Azure meta service broker provides Cloud Foundry developers with an easy way to provision and bind their applications to some of our most popular services, including Azure SQL, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Cosmos DB.

Visual Studio Team Services plugin - The Cloud Foundry plugin for Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) provides rich support for building continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for CF, including the ability to deploy to a CF environment from a VSTS hosted build agent, allowing teams to avoid managing build servers. And of course, the plug-in is open-source.

Open Service Broker

The Azure team has been deeply involved in enabling the Open Service Broker API ecosystem in Kubernetes and making it easier for developers to use Azure services through the Service Catalog as part of an effort that started with Deis. This broker strives to enable a standard interface for connecting cloud native platforms with application platforms like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. With Deis joining the Azure team, I am excited to announce Microsoft formally joining this Open Service Broker working group, a core initiative of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Working with this group, I hope we can accelerate the efforts to standardize the interface for connecting cloud native platforms, offering you even more multi-cloud and multi-platform portability.

Extending Choice for our Customers and Partners

Many of the largest enterprises have chosen Cloud Foundry to help solve complex business challenges and have looked to Azure as the leading enterprise cloud on which to run, including Ford, Manulife, and Merrill. Furthermore, we already work closely with many partners in the Cloud Foundry community, including Pivotal, SAP (SAP Cloud Platform), and GE. These announcements reinforce our support and excitement to work with these partners in this growing community. With our joining of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and the capabilities listed above I hope you find Azure offers the best place for deploying portable and open Cloud Foundry applications without any lock-in.